I'm not a moderator, the moderators can decide what they think, but when I was a moderator we saw this pattern sometimes dozens of times a day and 90% get auto removed by Reddit.
Read the stickies and rules if you want to participate in this sub genuinely. It should be very clear that people spamming links across Reddit that do not intend to participate authentically in the sub is against the rules.
Don't play dumb. You just hid your post history a few minutes after it clearly reveals you posting the same material across subs.
"Content that is re-shared across other subs for promotional purpose will be removed."
You are assuming good intent and integrity in all parties. When I was a mod that wasn't the case from what I observed. And I learned the hard way that a lot of people operate in the shadows and care very much about what is said in here.
It's a fucked up industry.
I'm going to caution with the premise of the question.
So first off, check for yourself because one off examples of jobs or no job don't mean much in isolation. A small number of people get jobs from all bootcamps. Both Codesmith and Launch School work on open source projects and you can review the projects, see the contributors, check their LinkedIns and see if they got jobs or not. Launch School has provided a report for 2024 grads that accounts for every single person that started and you can see that without doing the work.
Second, it highly depends on the person. People with a engineering background, or experience at a tech company in a non software role, and who take adjacent roles have a much better short.
For example, a 15 year salesperson at tech companies -> "Sales Engineer" is a massively different placement from no-degree no-experience line cook -> FAANG Software Engineer…
Agree with learning how to code. But using AI to explain it is critical. Another engineer talking to AI would have the answer explained to them in the time it took to make the top level post on Reddit.
This is a good starting point for them: [https://www.hellointerview.com/learn/system-design/in-a-hurry/introduction](https://www.hellointerview.com/learn/system-design/in-a-hurry/introduction)
I didn't mention this in my very long reply - but building on the 'self study while at the company'. If you haven't been promoted yet I might stay and push hard for a promotion and then job hunt because that will make a world of difference in getting interviews.
I can give you my 2 cents. These are my person answers with 15 years in industry, 8 years at Meta, trained interviewers, attended hiring committee, etc... but disclosure that my company works with your demographic for interview prep (career-side and technical side) so I have professional bias.
*- What would you expect an engineer with two years of experience to know?*
It's not about knowledge. You are expected to be able to take a large feature that is 2 weeks to a month of work, break it down and get it done independently (which means unblocking yourself by asking the right people).
*- Does seeing a bootcamp on a resume turn you off/do you prefer a degree?*
In this market, and if you have less than 2 YOE then yes. You are borderline so it depends on your job/company. And regardless, the company should be front and center and 50% of the page.
*- Is having a portfolio of side projec…
Current price: Codesmith: $22,500 (14 weeks). Launch School "18% of your first year salary, or $18k (USD)" (16 weeks), Hack Reactor: $19,480.
Enrollment at Codesmith based on OSLabs Github projects appears to have dropped from about 1000 people in 2023 to about 100(?) people in 2025 and like a dozen in the past 3 months?
Launch School had 71 people in 2023 and 76 in 2024, so it's maybe capturing the market share since that's actually higher.
So not that many people are paying that much no more.
Some people believe in manifesting positivity to build confidence. I actually think it helps a lot if the market is good and you need to stand out. Right now it's irrational to do a bootcamp.
I've been evaluating things rationally for 3 years now, pushing numerous bootcamps on what I perceive as 'reality' vs what they are 'marketing'.
Each bootcamp is unique and shouldn't be bundled together, but it's been a rough go for most of them the past few years. One or more bootcamps are down to less than a skeleton crew of staff and still charging $20K+.
It's been very costly for my personal reputation to do this with zero benefit.
Be careful not to cross the wrong people in this industry.
Some people believe in manifesting positivity to build confidence. I actually think it helps a lot if the market is good and you need to stand out. Right now it's irrational to do a bootcamp.
I've been evaluating things rationally for 3 years now, pushing numerous bootcamps on what I perceive as 'reality' vs what they are 'marketing'.
Very costly for my personal reputation to do this with zero benefit.
Be careful not to cross the wrong people in this industry.
Some people believe in manifesting positivity to build confidence. I actually think it helps a lot if the market is good and you need to stand out. Right now it's irrational to do a bootcamp.
I've been evaluating things rationally for 3 years now, pushing numerous bootcamps on what I perceive as 'reality' vs what they are 'marketing'.
Very costly for my personal reputation to do this with zero benefit.
Be careful not to cross the wrong people in this industry.
If we don't trust the system or at least feel like we can impact it then no propositions for taxes will fix that, we need to put pressure on the system being fixed before rogue propositions with consequences we don't understand.
Yeah that's right. What about the gains though while the loan is running.
E.g. I have $1B of Google stock and I get a line of credit and pay $400M in taxes left with $600M for the loan and then stock 10X's over the next 10 years. and the line has $6B backing it tax free?
But I see what you're saying that the initial amount isn't double taxed if they do it all at the same time.
Well the reason they don't sell is to avoid the taxes so doing this would effectively force them to sell -> diversify -> and then use THAT for a loan, which shouldn't be double taxes AGAIN.
I think there is a room for some kind of taxes here though, maybe just a compromise? Like Pay 5% on line of asset backed line of credits draw over $1M or something?
Yeah I agree, but just proposing more ideas, I think the average person should be aware of and think about all options they can before voting for one random solution proposed to the masses via a proposition.
This is indeed how wealthy people spend without selling assets, but this is also how mortgages work on houses. Billionaires pay interest on that borrowing and the interest goes to the banks as a profit.
If you have $1B of stock, get a line of credit and buy a $300M yacht on it. You are paying 4% (i.e. $12M a year COMPOUNDING) for life to the bank that loaned it to you.
A mortgage is an asset-backed loan too!
Is it fair that billionaires get lower interest rates? Maybe yes, maybe no, but I think there is something there in that interest.
I do NOT support this, but it's an alternate idea:
*Increase corporate taxes and fees on their businesses.*
Take the profits out of the multi hundred billion dollar cash hoards which by proxy lowers the earnings and stock price of companies, which lowers billionaires net worth.
I'm not a billionaire but I don't like any tax that's decided by the people instead of legislators and my opinion is we should be voting for legislators that understand the will of the people and try to make it happen in a complex system that normal people don't fully understand.
We elect people to dig into all of the details of millions of pages of laws and regulations and make things actually work, and if we don't trust those people then I think we need to vote for other people.
Thanks, that's interesting on the size. A lot of bootcamps had much better reputations when they were small and intimate rather than trying to scale up with fewer staff - hiring new grads to fill in gaps, etc...
On the other hand, there are some bootcamps that have shrunk down to almost no one and have shut down and not improved.
It sounds like you didn't go in expecting to get a job and found Le Wagon a good learning experience that was worth it for you. Was that the case for our cohort-mates? Did they go in expecting a job or not and was Le Wagon transparent about the outcomes upfront?
Their website has changed a lot to not focus so much on outcomes but still lists 86% placement rate so I'm curious.
They were offline for about a week and then reappeared with a new website, without much public explanation at the time.
The current site lists three schools: two in the U.S. and one outside the U.S. Of the two U.S. schools, one appears to be enrolling for a cohort starting roughly six months out.
The site now lists four board members. One individual publicly notes on LinkedIn that they are no longer serving in that role, which may simply reflect a recent or transitional change that hasn’t been updated everywhere yet.
The most recent update to the standards documentation was made by someone who previously worked at Codesmith and is now listed as a consultant there, which is publicly visible information.
Separately, Codesmith’s own website appears to reflect some recent staff changes, and they no longer appear as a sponsor on Course Report.
Taken together, these are just surface-level…
Thanks for sharing. We'll see when CIRR results come out soon but I really think this year will be the end for many remaining bootcamps in their current form.
Many programs still outcomes from like 2 years ago when they were already on a steep decline and when we start seeing the numbers from 2024 2025 I think there's no one who's going to want to join a boot camp after that unfortunately. Whatever goodwill some of the programs had saying that 2024 would be better and give them a shot are going to completely burn that when their actual outcomes come out soon.
Launch School is the only one I've seen for 2024 results so far and they're actually not bad but they're still lower than their peak and the program got a bit smaller this year.
But In the GitHub repos I look at and LinkedIn searches. it's kind of a ghost town for most bootcamp grads.
Heck even an employee at a top boot camp l…
Thanks for sharing. We'll see when CIRR results come out soon but I really think this year will be the end for many remaining bootcamps in their current form.
Many programs still outcomes from like 2 years ago when they were already on a steep decline and when we start seeing the numbers from 2024 2025 I think there's no one who's going to want to join a boot camp after that unfortunately.
Launch School is the only one I've seen for 2024 results so far and they're actually not bad but they're still lower than their peak and the program got a bit smaller this year.
But In the GitHub repos I look at and LinkedIn searches. it's kind of a ghost town for bootcamp grads.
Heck even an employee at a top boot camp listed on their website is telling people not to go to a bootcamp.
This sub is a lot of doom and gloom, but sadly the reality is much worse than the way this sub is making it loo…
\- big tech and FAANG = yes
\- the advantage via example: let's say you are at Princeton and there are 200 CS students in your class, the Google Princeton recruiter will probably look at all the resumes and if you can get some face time with them so they remember you = easier to get a chance to interview!
\- I don't have any insight into the impact of LLMs on the quality of current students :( I have random ideas but no evidence or unique insight so I'm not going to guess haha. But LLMs in general are impacting what it means to be an engineer for sure.
It's the only clear path but it's not the only way.
These schools have dedicated recruiters from the top company and some have quotas/targets for each school, so you have a huge leg up to getting your foot in the door.
They choose these schools simply based on the past hiring rates and they drop schools (even top 20 schools) that have low hiring rates.
Yes, that's correct, and I did have access to some top companies like Microsoft and Bloomberg but I got my job at Facebook which didn't recruit there at the time and I had to get there attention through other means.
I used their brand new API in my startup that I had and sent it to a recruiter and it moved me to the top of the stack for interviews.
Germany has a stronger apprenticeship culture, so if you can find a bootcamp with a guaranteed connection to an apprenticeship then go for it, but do your research and ask them a lot of questions to make sure you can trust them.
Oh that's totally fine :D I enjoy these discussions, but as a former moderator that dealt with so much crazy shit on here, I appreciate you being a careful Redditor.
Meta doesn't have job titles and at E7+ the titles vary from Senior Staff to Principal to Fellow to Architect, etc... E7 was my level, only 1.5% were at that level or higher, call it what you want and I'm ok with that :D.
I don't think it's as good as it gets credit for, BUT there are a number of very successful people who went there (e.g. Figma founders) and people who go there are very smart in general, so it gets targeted more than it probably should if you looked at it's CS on paper.
You can get jobs not in the top 20 CS schools, but you have to forge your own path and no one will tell you what that is. That's how I got my first job at Facebook...
Building real products is useful and recognizing DS&A is great too. I recommend alternating back and forth. Learn and practice some textbook stuff, then practice it legitimately, then go back to the books.
Don't put pressure on yourself to fully understand at each iteration, just sponge it in and go back and forth.